I Started a Blog to Make Money Here’s Every Mistake I Made in Year One

Let me be completely honest with you from the very first line.

When I started blogging, I had no idea what I was doing. I did not have a mentor. I did not have a course. I did not even fully understand what a blog was when I first heard the word I actually thought someone had mispronounced “vlog.”

That was 2022. I was watching YouTube videos, stumbling across terms I did not understand, and slowly piecing together the idea that people were writing articles on websites and making real money from it. Something about that clicked for me. I had always liked writing. So I thought if other people can do this, why not me?

What followed was one of the most frustrating, educational, and at times genuinely painful years of my life.

Here is every mistake I made and what I wish I had known before I made them.

Mistake 1: I Chose a Niche Based on Money, Not Knowledge

The first decision I made was also my worst one.

I had heard that finance was a high RPM niche meaning advertisers pay more per click on finance content than almost any other topic. I did not fully understand what RPM even meant at the time, but the message was clear: finance = more money. So I picked finance.

I called my blog “Financial Hub.” The idea was to create one central place where anyone could find everything related to finance. It sounded good in my head.

There was one problem: I knew almost nothing about finance.

I was not a finance student. I had no background in banking, investing, or economics. I had no personal experience managing money beyond basic daily expenses. But I had read that this niche paid well, and that felt like enough of a reason.

It was not.

When you write about something you do not actually know, it shows. Not just to readers but to search engines and ad networks too. You cannot fake expertise across dozens of articles. Eventually the gaps become obvious, the content becomes shallow, and the whole thing collapses under its own hollowness.

If I could go back and change one single decision from my entire blogging journey, it would be this one. Choose the niche you actually know something about. The RPM can come later. The knowledge has to come first.

Mistake 2: I Copied Content From a Big Website and Called It Blogging

This one is painful to write, but I am writing it anyway because I know I am not the only one who did this.

I found a large international finance website. Professional, well-structured, thousands of articles. I started copying those articles, making small modifications, and posting them on my blog as if they were mine.

My first article was about how to build a savings fund. I did not write it. I took it, changed a few words, and published it. Then I did it again. And again.

My thinking at the time was embarrassing in hindsight: just get content up, get the site going, start earning. I was not thinking about originality, about readers, about actually helping anyone. I was thinking about the money I had seen promised in YouTube videos.

At first, nothing dramatic happened. The site existed. A few impressions trickled in. I thought things were moving.

Then Google sent the Warning Message.

My Blogger account was suspended. Policy violations. The account I had spent months building the articles, the theme, the setup gone. Just like that.

I remember staring at the screen for a long time. I had not told anyone I was doing this. Not my family, not my friends. My household had no background in tech or computers, so explaining blogging to them had never seemed worth the effort. This meant I was sitting alone with the news that everything I had worked on had just been taken away.

In that moment, I genuinely thought about quitting. Not just blogging the whole idea of building anything online. It felt like proof that this was not for me.

What I did not understand yet was that I had not actually been blogging. I had been copying. And the internet does not reward copying it penalizes it, eventually and without mercy.

Mistake 3: I Thought Impressions Meant Success

Before the suspension, there was a brief period where I was feeling cautiously optimistic.

My site was getting 10 to 15 impressions in the first month. I did not fully understand the difference between impressions and clicks at the time. I saw numbers going up on my screen and thought okay, people are finding the site, this is working.

It was not working. Impressions without clicks, without engagement, without real readers mean almost nothing. The numbers were not a sign of growth. They were a sign that a few people had seen a page title in search results and scrolled past it.

I did not know this yet. So I kept posting, kept checking the numbers, kept believing I was on the right track.

Lesson: traffic metrics only matter when you understand what they actually measure. A beginner staring at analytics without context will almost always misread what they are seeing.

Mistake 4: A 0.52 Cent Earning Almost Convinced Me I Had Figured It Out

Shortly before the suspension, I had discovered Adstera.

It happened at a casual gathering the kind where nobody has an agenda, people are just talking. A friend of a friend mentioned he was making money from his website through something called Adstera. He showed me his dashboard. He had earned 0.12 dollars.

I remember my exact thought: if he can make 0.12 dollars from one article, I can make more than that from two.

I went home and set up Adstera the same day.

Over the next 10 to 15 days, watching my earnings go from zero to 0.06 dollars to eventually 0.52 dollars, I felt something I can only describe as dangerous optimism. I started calculating daily if I post this many articles, I will earn this much per week, this much per month. The math looked promising in my head.

I was posting two to three articles a day. All copied. All modified just enough to feel different. And the tiny numbers going up on my dashboard were giving me more motivation than I had ever felt.

Then the suspension came and reset everything to zero.

Looking back, that 0.52 dollars was not a sign I was succeeding. It was a sign I was about to learn the most expensive free lesson of my blogging journey.

Mistake 5: I Did Not Understand What AdSense Actually Required

After the Blogger suspension, I eventually came back. I built a WordPress site. A cousin had a website she wanted help with, and he offered me the project he would own it in name, I would build and manage everything. I saw it as an opportunity to try AdSense properly.

I did my research this time. I knew the basics necessary pages, enough articles, quality content. I set everything up as carefully as I could, with no outside help. Nobody in my circle understood what I was doing or could guide me. I was figuring it out entirely alone.

First application: rejected. “Update your AdSense application.”

I did not fully understand what that message meant. I added more articles, made improvements, applied again.

Second application: same message.

That second rejection hit differently. By then I had started hearing from others that AdSense was nearly impossible to get approved that Google was rejecting almost everyone. I started believing it. I told myself that if Google was not approving anyone, there was no point continuing. And I stopped.

What I know now that I did not know then: “Update your AdSense application” is not a final rejection. It is feedback vague, frustrating feedback, but feedback. It means something specific on the site needs fixing. It does not mean give up. It means find the problem and fix it.

But without guidance, without anyone to explain what I was actually looking at, I read it as a door permanently closing. And I walked away.

Mistake 6: I Kept Everything to Myself

This one is not about SEO or content strategy. It is about the human side of building something.

At every difficult moment in this journey the suspension, the rejections, the confusion I handled it completely alone. I never told my family because they would not have understood. I never asked for help in communities or forums. I just sat with the frustration, processed it by myself, and moved forward or did not move forward, entirely on my own.

There is a cost to that kind of isolation. When you have no one to help you interpret what went wrong, you fill the gap with your own assumptions and those assumptions are usually wrong. I assumed the suspension meant I was doing something unforgivably bad. I assumed the AdSense rejections meant the system was against me. I assumed I just was not the kind of person this worked for.

None of those assumptions were accurate. They were just the stories I told myself in the absence of real information.

If I could give one piece of practical advice to anyone starting out, it would be this: find a community. Ask questions. The blogging world is full of people who have been through exactly what you are going through, and most of them are willing to help. The worst thing you can do is suffer through the learning curve alone when you do not have to.

What Year One Actually Taught Me

Six years into this journey, I look back at that version of myself copying articles, watching a 0.12 dollar dashboard like it was a stock market, staying up late to post three articles I did not write and I do not feel embarrassed. I feel grateful.

Not because the mistakes did not hurt. The suspension hurt. The rejections hurt. The silence of handling all of it alone hurt.

But every one of those mistakes taught me something that no YouTube video or paid course ever explained properly.

The niche you choose should be based on what you know, not what pays the most. You cannot shortcut your way to credibility. Copying is not a content strategy it is a countdown to suspension. AdSense rejection is not a dead end it is a diagnostic. And no metric matters if you do not understand what it is actually measuring.

I am still in this. Still building. Still figuring things out.

The only difference between now and year one is that I stopped making the same mistakes and started making new ones. Which, in blogging, means you are actually growing.